Advertising

1. Regarding the link at the bottom of each page for "Books": Is it
appropriate to link at the bottom of every page to a page of mostly
commercial? books about GIMP?
It seems more appropriate to have a link to the page of books
about GIMP from only the Documentation page, instead of from every page
on the website (on the actual Books page it would nice to show what
version of GIMP the various books were written for).

2. The printed credits to individuals for artwork on the GIMP home page
seem visually distracting. What about using an "on hover" credit like
the very attractive on-hover credit (which doesn't seem to need any
scripts to work) used by the Krita home page (krita.org), and maybe also
give credit on the "about/authors" page?

3. What is the line drawing at the bottom of the page about? Maybe it's
obvious to everyone else, but I don't have a single clue why that line
drawing is there.

4. According to a study, a website viewer's gaze "tracks" the gaze of
people in photographs. The lady in the "High quality Photo Manipulation"
image is looking to the left, completely out of the frame. Flip the
image left to right and she's directing her gaze, and also the reader's
gaze, towards the text and the page.

5. The section for "Key Component in a Desktop Publishing Workflow":
Could this section be made smaller and put side-by-side with the section
on Extensibility & Flexibility, so that visually these two sections
match the visual weight/space devoted to Photo Manipulation, Original
Artwork, Graphic Design, and Programming Algorithms?

* This section has a larger, bolder headline font than the other
"equal weight" items (editing photographs, doing graphic design, etc)
and a whole lot more page space devoted to it, which makes it seem like
GIMP is mostly meant for desktop publishing.

* The sentence "It is best used in workflows involving other free
software such as Scribus, Inkscape, and SwatchBooker" almost makes it
sound like GIMP can't be used very well or easily without also
installing these other softwares.

All pages: The site requires javascript enabled to display the icons at
the bottom of the page. Otherwise, except for the GIMP icon, the icons
are just place-holders.
Some people consider scripts to be a security risk. Is there a way
to make the icons at the bottom of the page display without requiring
the user to enable scripts?

* The GIMP toolkit. The linked-to page doesn't show any
connection to GIMP. A lot of people won't know that GTK started as part
of GIMP.

* The GNU links: following those links, again the
relationship between GNU and GIMP isn't clear except to people who
already know the relationship between GNU and GIMP.

The donations page (http://static.gimp.org/donating/): It almost seems
like donating to GIMP really is donating to GNOME? At least some of the
methods for making donations don't give a warm feeling that GIMP
specifically will get the donations.

* Again, some users consider scripts to be a security risk.
* The message displayed when scripts are disabled is very long.
* Sometimes users "spoof" the OS in the header information.

* Sometimes users want to download software for an operating
system other than what they are using.

Why not just cut to the chase, disable the OS-detecting script,
and use the one line:

"Show downloads for GNU/Linux | OS X | Microsoft Windows | All"

Also the download page has MD5 check-sums for all the GIMP 2.8
releases. It might be better to only offer check-sums for the last GIMP
2.8 release, and maybe offer some of the more secure types of check-sums
plus "how to check" information.